10 Stocks the Best Fund Managers Have Been Buying

On one hand, it’s good to be a stock investor in 2024: Through late August, the Morningstar US Market Index is up more than 18%. But if you’re trying to put new money to work, the pickings are getting slim: According to Morningstar’s US Market Fair Value estimate, stocks look about fairly valued today.

Where has the “smart money” been finding investment opportunities during the past few months?

To find out, we’ve taken a look into the latest portfolios of some of the best mutual fund managers. To isolate the top stock investors among current active fund managers, we screened on the following:

• Actively managed funds that land in Morningstar’s US large-value, US large-blend, or US large-growth categories.
• Funds with at least one share class earning Morningstar Medalist Ratings of Gold with 100% analyst coverage.
• Funds that hold 100 stocks or fewer as of their most recently reported portfolios.

Thirteen separate fund portfolios passed our screen. We then compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months prior to determine what stocks these managers have been buying.

Most of the stocks that top managers have been buying look fairly valued today according to Morningstar, but there are a couple of undervalued stocks in the mix.

10 Stocks That the Best Fund Managers Are Buying

Here are some of the stocks that top managers have been investing in during the past few months.

1. Nvidia NVDA
2. Apple AAPL
3. UnitedHealth Group UNH
4. Kenvue KVUE
5. Broadcom AVGO
6. Salesforce CRM
7. Cadence Design Systems CDNS
8. Citigroup C
9. Thermo Fisher Scientific TMO
10. Intuit INTU

Here’s a little bit about each stock pick, along with some commentary from the analyst who follows the company. All data is as of Aug. 23, 2024.

Nvidia

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 5
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 1.23
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Very High
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Growth
• Sector: Technology

The top stock pick during the latest quarter from the best fund managers is Nvidia. After rising more than 800% between Jan. 1, 2023, and mid-June of this year, Nvidia stock pulled back by more than 25% into July and early August. Since then, however, the stock has resumed its rise and is approaching its all-time high as of this writing. Nvidia stock trades 23% above our $105 fair value estimate. Morningstar strategist Brian Colello expects that Nvidia will report results exceeding guidance while projecting even higher revenue in the October quarter. “We still believe the firm is supply-constrained, and that its revenue is somewhat capped by the production availability of key manufacturers and partners,” he adds.

Nvidia has a wide economic moat, thanks to its market leadership in graphics processing units, hardware and software tools needed to enable the exponentially growing market around artificial intelligence. In the long run, we expect tech titans to strive to find second-sources or in-house solutions to diversify away from Nvidia in AI, but most likely, these efforts will chip away at, but not supplant, Nvidia’s AI dominance.

Nvidia’s GPUs handle parallel processing workloads, using many cores to efficiently process data at the same time. In contrast, central processing units, such as Intel’s processors for PCs and servers, or Apple’s processors for its Macs and iPhones, process the data of “0′s and 1′s” in a serial fashion. The wheelhouse of GPUs has been the gaming market, and Nvidia’s GPU graphics cards have long been considered best of breed.

More recently, parallel processing has emerged as a near-requirement to accelerate AI workloads. Nvidia took an early lead in AI GPU hardware, but more important, developed a proprietary software platform, Cuda, and these tools allow AI developers to build their models with Nvidia. We believe Nvidia not only has a hardware lead but also benefits from high customer switching costs around Cuda, making it unlikely for another GPU vendor to emerge as a leader in AI training.

We think Nvidia’s prospects will be tied to the AI market, for better or worse, for quite some time. We expect leading cloud vendors to continue to invest in in-house, while CPU titans AMD and Intel are working on GPUs and AI accelerators for the data center. However, we view Nvidia’s GPUs and Cuda as the industry leaders, and the firm’s massive valuation will hinge on whether, and for how long, the company can stay ahead of the rest of the pack.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Nvidia.

Apple

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 3
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 1.23
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Growth
• Sector: Technology

The second of six technology names on the list of the stocks that the best managers have been buying is Apple. Morningstar raised its fair value estimate on the wide-moat consumer electronics giant to $185 from $170 after digesting the firm’s latest earnings. “We continue to expect strong revenue growth in fiscal 2025 as users upgrade their iPhones to take advantage of Apple’s generative artificial intelligence features, requiring the latest and greatest hardware,” explains Morningstar analyst William Kerwin. “We now forecast double-digit iPhone revenue growth in fiscal 2025 and another strong year of revenue growth in fiscal 2026.” Apple stock looks expensive, trading 23% above our fair value estimate.

We believe Apple has cemented a long-term position atop the consumer electronics industry with a focus on a premium ecosystem of tightly integrated hardware, software, and services. We see the flagship iPhone as the linchpin of this ecosystem, from which Apple derives pricing power, switching costs, and a network effect. In our view, every other Apple device and service sees its greatest value from further locking in customers to this walled garden. This approach earns the firm a wide economic moat rating.

We are impressed with Apple’s core design prowess, across both hardware and software, that we think is the product of immense cumulative research and development investments. We like Apple’s latest push to bring most of its chip development in-house. To us, this gives the firm more opportunity for product customization and a better ability to differentiate. In our view, Apple reduces its own cyclicality compared with other consumer electronics players by melding its semiconductors, hardware, and software together.

Over the medium term, we expect Apple to focus on progressing its internal chip development, artificial intelligence capabilities, and further developing new form factors like its Vision Pro headset. Each one of these initiatives will hedge the firm against disruption risk, in our view. We also anticipate the company will continue returning tremendous amounts of cash back to shareholders, which is supported by its strong balance sheet.

We hold concerns over geopolitical and regulatory risk for Apple but don’t see these threatening the firm’s moat. Apple’s supply chain is heavily concentrated in China and Taiwan, and disruptions to the status quo in these regions could limit its supply. Apple has thus far been adept at managing its complex supply chain and is actively diversifying into new regions. Apple has also been targeted by regulations, particularly out of Europe, which chip away at its differentiation by opening up its App Store and iMessage services. We don’t foresee more damaging regulation on the horizon and believe the firm is adequately reinforcing its stickiness with customers by adding new devices and services with which to lock them in.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Apple.

UnitedHealth Group

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 3
• Morningstar price/fair value: 1.06
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Core
• Sector: Healthcare

UnitedHealth Group is the first of two healthcare stocks on our list of stocks that top investors have been investing in. We raised our fair value estimate on the stock of this large private health insurer by 6% after the company reported stronger second-quarter earnings that we’d expected. Morningstar senior analyst Julie Utterback notes that management’s guidance for earnings this year is below the firm’s annual growth goal of 13%-16%, given industrywide headwinds including Medicaid redeterminations, Medicare Advantage constraints, and elevated medical utilization. Shares of UnitedHealth Group trade at a premium to our $550 fair value estimate.

UnitedHealth operates a top-tier health insurer (UnitedHealthcare), pharmacy benefit manager (Optum Rx), provider (Optum Health), and health analytics franchise (Optum Insight). This integrated strategy has resulted in some of the best returns in the industry over the years and has been copied at least in part by the late 2018 mergers at CVS Health, which added Aetna’s medical insurance assets to its retail stores and PBM, and Cigna, which added Express Scripts’ PBM assets to its medical insurance operations. With the alignment of these interests, we think vertically integrated organizations like UnitedHealth have the opportunity to help bend the healthcare cost curve in the US, but questions continue to swirl around whether managed care organizations’ pursuit of profits outweighs those broader benefits for the US health system.

UnitedHealth has demonstrated an uncanny ability to remain at the leading edge of changes affecting the industry. For example, its 2015 acquisition of Catamaran greatly increased its PBM scale and helped create a more holistic view of a patient's care. That combination of services has created attractive synergies for clients, such as employers and government programs, that are seeking to lower overall healthcare costs rather than just pharmacy or medical benefits. Adding service providers to the mix aligns incentives even further, especially since the firm's outpatient care assets offer significantly lower costs than hospital-based services. The firm's analytical tools help organizations pull various healthcare information related to its other operations together to provide an even fuller picture of a patient's health and care options.

By providing those diverse yet connected services, UnitedHealth aims to grow in nearly any regulatory environment. It is shooting for 13%-16% annual earnings growth in the long run, including strong operational growth and capital allocation activities, such as acquisitions and repurchases. While some regulatory scenarios could eventually cut into that mission, we suspect the value that UnitedHealth provides to the US healthcare system will help it remain relevant in the long run.

Read Morningstar’s full report on UnitedHealth Group.

Kenvue

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 2
• Morningstar price/fair value: 0.84
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Mid Core
• Sector: Consumer Defensive

Kenvue is the most undervalued stock on our list. The stock of this global leader in consumer health products struggled after it was spun out from Johnson & Johnson: It was down more than 25% between its market debut in May 2023 and June 2024. Since then, though, the stock has staged a rally, gaining almost 22% since July 1. Morningstar analyst Keonhee Kim observes that second-quarter results looked solid and may’ve signaled a turnaround for Kenvue. Even after the recent really, Kenvue is still trading at an attractive 16% below Morningstar’s fair value estimate of $26.

Kenvue is the world’s largest pure-play consumer health company by revenue, generating $15 billion in annual sales. Formerly known as Johnson & Johnson’s consumer segment, Kenvue spun off and went public in May 2023. We expect Kenvue, with the freedom to allocate capital and invest as a stand-alone entity, to prioritize growing its 15 priority brands (including Tylenol, Nicorette, Listerine, and Zyrtec) to drive future growth. We forecast the company to spend roughly 3% of sales in research and development, on par with some of its wide-moat competitors, to launch innovative products, specifically in digital consumer health. Recent examples include the Nicorette QuickMist SmartTrack spray and Zyrtec AllergyCast app.

Kenvue has been rationalizing its portfolio through a reduction in a number of stock-keeping units and business selloffs (15 divestitures from 2016-22). Now that most of this optimization is behind us, we expect a more agile portfolio. Macro factors such as an aging population, premiumization of consumer healthcare products, and growing emerging markets should provide tailwinds for Kenvue’s wide array of brands. We also expect Kenvue to benefit from an increasing digital investment—71% of the company’s marketing spending in 2022 was digital versus 44% in 2019—as this should fuel both e-commerce and in-person store sales.

We expect margin expansion from two channels: favorable pricing dynamics and improving supply chain efficiencies. Our analysis tells us that Kenvue has been able to stay ahead of its markets in terms of price hikes, and we expect this trend to continue thanks to its products’ strong brand power. Amid the current inflationary environment, we have seen Kenvue wisely pass along rising costs through robust price hikes, with 7.7% of sales growth achieved from price and mix during 2023. We also expect cost savings over the next five years from supply chain optimization initiatives as Kenvue dedicates roughly 60% of capital expenditures to automation and digitalization of its manufacturing and distribution network, improving end-to-end integration.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Kenvue.

Broadcom

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 3
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 1.07
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Core
• Sector: Technology

Broadcom has a wide economic moat and growing AI upside, argues Morningstar’s Kerwin. In fact, we raised our fair value estimate on Broadcom stock in June by nearly 15% after AI chip sales exceeded our expectations and management raised its full-year revenue guidance. However, shares look slightly overpriced by our metrics. “We continue to see Broadcom’s valuation as challenging, reflecting even more robust AI sales growth than our bullish expectations,” he adds. Broadcom stock looks about 7% overvalued relative to Morningstar’s fair value estimate of $155.

Broadcom is an amalgamation of high-value chip and software businesses that on the whole are differentiated and moaty, in our view. Broadcom is a terrific aggregator of firms, big and small. Its ability to acquire and streamline generates strong profits and cash flow and fuels its robust dividend. We laud the firm for its execution and operating efficiency, which build upon its large organic investment and help it to outperform its end markets organically.

In our view, Broadcom’s networking and wireless chip businesses are its strongest and contribute heavily to the firm’s wide economic moat. We anticipate it maintaining a technological lead in thin-film bulk acoustic resonator filters, which it sells exclusively into Apple’s iPhone. We also expect it to maintain product leadership in merchant silicon for switching and routing applications and to defend its strong relationships with heavyweight equipment vendors Cisco Systems and Arista Networks. Broadcom’s software businesses sell virtualization software, mainframe software, and cybersecurity software, and we see its offerings as highly competitive. Broadcom’s focus on strategic large software customers like financial institutions, governments, and large enterprises—where it is deeply embedded—elicits steep switching costs. We also see upselling opportunities with VMware under the firm’s belt.

Going forward, we see Broadcom benefiting from moderate, steady growth from data center networking, Apple unit sales, and upselling for its software customers. We believe artificial intelligence will become a material organic driver to the networking business, as applications like large language models require advanced network switching, where Broadcom’s chips are best-of-breed. We expect acquisitions to still be on Broadcom’s radar but perhaps with larger, less frequent deals. After closing on VMware in 2023, we expect the firm to focus on deleveraging for a couple of years before tapping back into the acquisition market.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Broadcom.

Salesforce

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 4
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.93
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Growth
• Sector: Technology

Salesforce is one of the slightly undervalued stock picks on our list of buys from the top managers, trading 7% below Morningstar’s $285 fair value estimate. Morningstar senior analyst Dan Romanoff noted that fiscal first-quarter revenue numbers were softer than expected and management guided to lower second-quarter numbers, too—and Romanoff suspects that achieving management’s revenue goals for the year could be challenging. Yet he considers wide-moat Salesforce “one of the best long-term investment opportunities in software.”

We believe Salesforce represents one of the best long-term investment opportunities in software, particularly as it should provide investors with a nice balance between revenue growth and improving profitability. Even as revenue growth has decelerated, we believe a new focus on margin expansion, share buybacks, and dividends should continue to compound strong earnings growth for years to come.

After introducing the software-as-a-service model to the world, Salesforce has assembled a front-office empire that it can build on for years to come, in our view. Sales Cloud represents the original salesforce automation product, which streamlined process management for sales leads and opportunities, contact and account data, process tracking, approvals, and territory tracking. Salesforce’s critical differentiator was that the software was accessed through a web browser and delivered over the internet, thus inventing the SaaS software delivery model. Service Cloud brought in customer service applications, and Marketing Cloud delivers marketing automation solutions. Finally, we think Data Cloud helps ties the offerings together. These solutions encompass nearly all aspects of customer acquisition and retention and, in our view, are mission-critical. Salesforce Platform also offers customers a platform-as-a-service solution, complete with the AppExchange, as a way to rapidly create and distribute apps. We believe this further strengthens the substantial community of Salesforce users.

In our view, Salesforce will benefit further from natural cross-selling among its clouds, upselling more robust features within product lines, vertical solutions, pricing actions, and international growth. Salesforce is widely considered a leader in each of its served markets, which is attractive on its own, but the tight integration among the solutions and the natural fit they have with one another make for a powerful value proposition, in our view. To that end, more than half of enterprise customers use multiple clouds. Further, customer retention has gradually improved over time and is better than 92%, which we expect to grind higher still in the coming years.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Salesforce.

Cadence Design Systems

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 1
• Morningstar price/fair value: 1.14
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: High
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Growth
• Sector: Technology

A less-attractive tech stock pick on our list from a valuation perspective, Cadence Design Systems looks 14% overvalued relative to Morningstar’s $240 fair value estimate. Morningstar’s Colello notes that second-quarter results of this narrow-moat company came in ahead of our expectations, and we believe Cadence will benefit from the burgeoning adoption of electronic design automation tools driven by chip demand from artificial intelligence. We model a five-year compound annual growth rate for revenue of 14% through 2028.

Cadence provides electronic design automation software, intellectual property, and system design and analysis products that are critical to the semiconductor chip design process. As secular trends toward artificial intelligence, 5G communications, autonomous vehicles, and cloud computing, among others, accelerate, we expect that Cadence will benefit from both the rising complexity of chip designs and the advancing digitalization of various end markets. We believe narrow-moat Cadence has a long growth runway as it uses strategic organic and inorganic investments to expand its platform amid a growing semiconductor landscape.

We believe Cadence’s products are transformational in enabling increasingly complex integrated circuit and system-on-chip design. Advancing technologies require these more powerful, precise, and efficient chips, for which EDA software informs the end-to-end process. Cadence is the second-largest EDA vendor, behind Synopsys. It has multi-decade-spanning market dominance in analog design and is emerging as a solid competitor in digital design. While we expect Cadence to grow at a slightly more muted pace than Synopsys, we view the firm’s analog stability, focus on profitability, and building of a holistic offering that includes specialized system-level solutions as creating a compelling, risk-mitigated narrative.

Outside of core EDA, we view Cadence’s IP and systems businesses as benefiting from industry trends as well. As systems companies increasingly design their own differentiated silicon in-house, we expect Cadence to benefit from a customer base expanding beyond traditional semiconductor designers, as well as from an increasing reliance on IP. Further, the system business’ system-level analysis becomes critical as designs trend from chip-level to board-level and multitude integrated systems become the standard for supporting advanced technologies.

Reflecting on the critical nature of EDA tools, Cadence exhibits negligible churn, with customer retention consistently around 100%, and has relationships with all major chip design companies in the United States.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Cadence Design Systems.

Citigroup

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 3
• Morningstar price/fair value: 0.88
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: None
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Value
• Sector: Financial Services

Citigroup is one of the most undervalued stocks on our list of stocks the best fund managers have been buying. Despite the stock’s solid recent performance—the stock is up more than 56% for the trailing one-year period as of Aug. 23—Morningstar analyst Suryansh Sharma reminds investors that Citi remains in turnaround mode and faces unique challenges that other large banks don’t. (Read more about these challenges in the analysis below.) Citi stock looks 12% undervalued relative to our $70 fair value estimate.

Citigroup has an international commercial banking franchise and a domestically focused retail banking unit. The bank’s commercial operations—services, markets, and banking segments (which were previously grouped under Institutional Client Group)—has large trading, investment banking, international corporate banking, and custody operations. The commercial banking operation is Citi’s most unique business, as its global footprint is hard to replicate. This international presence will help Citigroup remain a bank of choice for cross-border companies. While this global presence offers some advantages, it is expensive and complicated to maintain, and the bank’s markets desk also produces low returns. As a result, returns for the commercial banking business have been mixed.

The bank's other main segments are its US personal banking (USPB) unit and its wealth unit. USPB is a primarily US-focused credit card business, with some retail banking. The wealth segment provides services for global clients. These units have had mixed results in the past, as the bank is not as dominant or as profitable as its peers in retail banking, credit card, or wealth operations.

The bank is in the midst of a major turnaround and remains a complex story. The bank is working through consent orders from regulators, selling off its international consumer operations, and refocusing its wealth unit. Simplification should make the bank easier to understand and structurally more focused, but we think Citi will still trail its peers from a profitability standpoint and struggle to outearn its cost of capital, and would note that the turnaround remains a difficult, multiyear journey.

Citi presents investors with a tough choice. The bank's issues are real. The tough part is this complex story has more often been a value trap rather than a true success story. The bank will need to prove it can bring core costs down, grow fee revenue, and produce momentum in the wealth business. Maybe then there will be a path toward earning its cost of capital. Getting consent orders removed would also be a positive catalyst. The bank's final major divestiture, its Mexico retail unit, is set to IPO in 2025.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Citigroup.

Thermo Fisher Scientific

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 4
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 0.96
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Core
• Sector: Healthcare

Thermo Fisher Scientific is the second healthcare name on our list of stocks the best fund managers have been buying. This wide-moat company sells scientific instruments and laboratory equipment, diagnostics consumables, and life sciences reagents. Morningstar director Alex Morozov points out that results in 2024 are lapping strong results from the prior year; we think the company is set to recover in the second half of the year. Thermo Fisher stock is trading just 4% below our $630 fair value estimate.

Thermo Fisher didn’t just come out of the toughest two years for the global economy unscathed, the company delivered some of its best results. Being the premier life science supplier and having an unmatched portfolio of products, resources, and manufacturing capabilities have allowed the firm to meet massive demand. The pandemic reaffirmed the company’s entrenched and dominant positioning with the supply chain, and the current budget-constrained environment still leaves the company in a better position than most of its peers. Thermo Fisher remains in a great position to leverage its share gains in the biopharma channel and capitalize on strong long-term demand.

While bigger is not always better, Thermo Fisher had long committed itself to accumulate as robust a product offering, under one roof, as possible. To reach its ultimate goal of being a one-stop shop go-to provider of life science instruments and consumables, the company has spent aggressively throughout the years on internal efforts but particularly on acquisitions. More than $50 billion has been deployed since 2010 on this strategy (including the recent PPD acquisition), which, while accretive to the company’s reach, scale, and product breadth, has historically suppressed its returns on invested capital to rather modest levels. Not anymore.

While the uplift from covid-19 tests and vaccines has been significant, the swiftness and extent of the company's response has cemented Thermo Fisher's integral role within the segment. The company has long found a receptive audience to its pitch with large pharma clients, which see sizable benefits in the simplified procurement process Thermo Fisher offers. Accelerated by the pandemic, the critical supplier status has been extended to the firm by a much wider audience, including governments. We anticipate the firm's penetration of all its customer channels to grow, aided by its expansion into contract research and manufacturing. We also think the company's global reach will continue to resonate, and its already strong presence within rapidly growing emerging markets to expand further.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Intuit

• Number of best managers buying the stock: 3
• Morningstar Price/Fair Value: 1.13
• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Medium
• Morningstar Style Box: Large Growth
• Sector: Technology

Intuit rounds out our list of stocks that the best managers have been investing in. We raised our fair value estimate on the stock to $550 from $520 after earnings, as we see AI bets beginning to pay off, explains Morningstar analyst Julie Bhusal Sharma. But even after the fair value boost, we think shares look overpriced today: Intuit stock is trading 13% above our fair value estimate.

Intuit is the giant behind US small-business accounting software QuickBooks and do-it-yourself US tax software TurboTax. With TurboTax and QuickBooks online sales having eclipsed their respective desktop sales, Intuit has now transitioned into a cloud-first company. Consequently, this has enabled Intuit to leverage customer data to streamline the user experience across disparate products and to natively market its offerings, in turn supporting switching costs and a network effect, which we consider to already be the backbones of Intuit’s wide moat.

Over the past several years, Intuit has continued to innovate. The firm has realized the insecurity customers have in accomplishing the consequential tasks of tax filing or business accounting on software alone. In turn, for both its small-business and consumer customers, Intuit has launched matchmaking systems. In accounting, that means matching small businesses with accountants, and in tax, that means adding a human review to the filing process. We think both matchmaking mechanisms pose meaningful opportunity ahead, in the form of increased customer retention on both sides and getting exposure to the assisted tax market. Now that Intuit is starting to reap the benefits of playing matchmaker, next up is to take big bets on QuickBooks complements, such as creating an omnichannel sales platform for small businesses. While these buildouts will take time, we think such direction will help propel the QuickBooks network effect as customers continue to demand all-in-one software to run their businesses.

Intuit’s business is not immune to risk, which we think lies particularly in IRS tax-filing regulation as well as the risk of new entrants in the small-business accounting space. Still, such risks, in our view, would only gradually chip away at Intuit’s accounting and tax dominance, given the force of its network effect and its financial health equipping Intuit with the ability to turn the tides.

Read Morningstar’s full report on Intuit.

Who Are the Best Fund Managers?

Thirteen large-cap funds passed our screen and therefore qualify as our top managers.

• Brandes U.S. Value ETF BUSA
• Diamond Hill Large Cap DHLYX
• Dodge & Cox Stock DODGX
• JPMorgan Equity Income OIEJX
• Loomis Sayles Growth LSGRX
• MFS Value MEIJX
• Morgan Stanley Growth MSEQX
• Oakmark OAKMX
• Parnassus Core Equity PRILX
• Principal Blue Chip PGBHX
• T. Rowe Price All-Cap Opportunities PRWAX
• T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Equity TCAF
• Vanguard Dividend Growth VDIGX

Six of the funds land in Morningstar’s US large-value category: Brandes U.S. Value ETF, Diamond Hill Large Cap, Dodge & Cox Stock, JPMorgan Equity Income, MFS Value, and Oakmark. Parnassus Core Equity, T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Equity ETF, and Vanguard Dividend Growth are categorized as US large-blend funds. And Loomis Sayles Growth, Morgan Stanley Growth, Principal Blue Chip, and T. Rowe Price All-Cap Opportunities hail from the US large-growth category.

How Do We Determine Which Stocks the Best Managers Are Buying?

To determine which stocks top managers are investing in, we compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months prior. We then calculated a “buy score” for each stock, which is a weighted average that allows us to make apples to apples comparisons of the most-purchased stocks. One or two managers making large purchases of a stock could lead to the same buy score as many managers purchasing small amounts of a stock.

Morningstar editors Margaret Giles and Lauren Solberg developed the methodologies and tools required to create this content.